Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

We are starting to see a theme across several commentators recently: That the economic downturn will force an expanded role for talent management.

To quote Josh Bersin’s excellent blog on the topic: 

The critical problems organizations face in 2009 are very different: rapid market changes, restructuring, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions. These problems not only create a need for better alignment and leadership, but a heavy focus on rapid talent planning, employee mobility, rapid skills development, and business agility. 

Today I hear more and more HR and business leaders telling me “we have our talent management strategy well underway” but what we really need is a “People Strategy.”

Read Josh’s full article here.

It seems everyone is talking about the down economy and its impact on HR lately, but who has the time to read it all? We’ve polled major industry analysts and clients, and boiled their wisdom down to three must-read pieces of advice for managing performance in tough times.

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You couldn’t miss the team at the Chicago HR Tech, sporting our new shirts and handing out stickers, post-it notes and other schwag emblazoned with the Version 3 catchphrase: “At last, performance reviews that don’t suck.”

The schwag cupboard’s not quite bare yet, so if you want to get your hands on some then post a reply with your reason as to why you need schwag… If we like it then we’ll send you some. You never know, you might even be lucky enough to lay hands on the elusive jet black Sonar6 tee, suitable for both mother-of-the-bride and after-five.

What a killer week! An unparalleled opportunity to talk to literally hundreds of clients, prospects, competitors, industry analysts and other luminaries. Here are the three big recurring themes from these conversations:

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Samuel Culbert wrote a wonderfully provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back titled “Get Rid of the Performance Review - It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line. And that’s just for starters.”

Read it here. It’s over-the-top but it sure highlights the things wrong with traditional approaches to performance reviews, including a common thread of managers, subordinates and HR working cross purposes.

Our answer to this at Sonar6 has always been engagement. Performance management has to be useful. Useful for the manager wanting to build performance in their team, useful to the employee wanting support to improve and progress, and most importantly useful to help the organization make better people decisions.

The sentiment is mirrored by Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion in his equally provocative piece “We Are Doing Performance Management All Wrong” where he advocates performance management should not be about automating the performance review process, but rather about equiping everyone to make better decisions. Also definitely worth a read.

Sonar6 was visited last week by America’s Cup sailor Ray Davies. Ray was the strategist onboard Team New Zealand as they won the Louis Vuitton Cup and challenged for the America’s Cup off Valencia last year. He talked to our development team and our HQ sales and marketing team about the similarities between winning yacht races and running a startup technology company…

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To paraphrase every second client conversation I have: “The pressure cooker of the war for talent means I have to rapidly solve this enormously complex problem of attracting, retaining and getting the best out of people. WHERE DO I START?”

In this brief article Mike Carden explains why performance management is the most critical piece of any talent management strategy, as well as offering 4 tips to accelerating performance management in your organization.

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A couple of years ago, when we first launched Sonar6, we were thinking about vertical targeting. Should we target tech companies, or lawyers, or biotech, or retail, or manufacturing…? With a small sales team, choosing a handful of narrow verticals seemed to make sense. But we quickly learned that there was a much simpler way to segment the market: businesses that get it, and businesses that don’t get it.

There’s a very enthusiastic blog post from J William Tincup here on Sonar6. William’s a person that gets it. While you’re there spend a bit of time on the Starr-Tincup site, they’ve got some great comments and overviews of the HR technology players.

The biggest mistake of early online performance management systems has been an unrelenting focus on compliance.  Ask HR people with a paper-based system what their biggest issue is and they say, “Compliance. Only 30% of the reviews come back on time.” So, by putting the process online it becomes much easier to track and drive compliance, and crack the whip. Problem solved. NOT.

Unfortunately better compliance tracking does nothing to fix the underlying problem…that users probably weren’t complying because the performance review process was either too hard, considered irrelevant, useless or unnecessary.

In this article Mike Carden discusses the difference between building software to sell to HR departments, versus building software that end users find… useful.

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Many businesses develop odd pieces to their culture… at Sonar6 we probably have some of the oddest. Example: the Staff Meeting With Scones (SMWS). Every second week we have a meeting of all of the Sonar6 Labs development team, and the HQ Sales and Marketing staff, at which one “volunteer” is responsible for cooking scones for everyone.

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